I've got pie but I'm not a pion

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Feeling strangely positive...
... about various things. I think my normal reserves of negativity may have been depleted.

Or maybe there was something in the Swine Flu jab. No, no, no, the germs are everywhere. Sapping my precious bodily fluids. Oh noes. And the invisible blue space lizards. They're eveyrwhere!

Black-Suit-Black-Shoes-White-Shirt-Dark-Tie-Punk
Why is there so much written about the Difference Engine, a thing that was not made and essentially had no meaningful influence on the development of the computer as we know it, compared to what is written about the Hollerith Type I Tabulator, which was and did? It is not as if they are nasty boring electronic machines, they are big and have plenty of moving parts. Is it just the appeal of 'that which is not'? By dint of never having existed, the difference engine wasn't used for all the boring things that computers are used for in the real world, and weren't sold by men in suits and ties?

Why is the basement of the Museum Of History Of Science not full of bits of real machines and heroic pictures of the men and women of The British Tabulating Machine Company instead of that wretched 'steampunk' exhibition (mutter mutter)? Notably, of course, Harold 'Doc' Keen who had worked for BTM since before WWI and designed the Bombes of Bletchley Park (based, of course, on Alan Turing's conception).

The Matrix if it were filmed in the silent era
Here on YouTube (pointed out for those who are not friends on LJ of

rozk who linked to it a few days ago).

Riiiiip
An irked weasel writes: There goes a 2nd pair of jeans. The second pair that have ripped this year. I have certainly put on some weight this year, but not to the extent that the jeans are obviously tight round the waist. Indeed, I suspect that if the waist were any bigger then we would be in the old territory of them being able to fall down without being undone. Maybe the weight has gone to my hips (!).

In
From iTunes (in reverse alphabetical order, as that's the order they were in when I noticed them)

In These Shoes?
In The Summer Camp
In The Sanatorium
In The Morning
In Sarah, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Women And Men
In C
In C
In August
In A Landscape

And...
One of the new tracks is now the longest track in iTunes apart from recordings (or whatever the young people call them) off the radio (or whatever the young people call them).
Music for 18 Muscians - Steve Reich - 56 mins 31 secs

Ha
I vanquish thee, crap software. eMusic working now. I have probably given them some money due to months where I couldn't be bothered to beat it into submission but once again I think I have won on the basis that they charge by track and all the tracks I have downloaded have been immensely long.
Is it only me for whom most installers on Windows silently fail if they aren't run as adminstrator? Is this because most people don't have things set up to give their normal log-on limited privileges, or do things fail more gracefully for other people?

Another sign of The End Times
There is a link to a story about Furries on the front page of the BBC news website.

Things that strike you
I must have listened to the song '(You) Tattooed Me' by Tom Robinson over a hundred times easily, it has been on heavy rotation on mix-tapes / CDs / iPods for 20 years I think. Today, for the first time it occurred to me that the lines
"When I was sound asleep as you left to join the fleet
You tattooed your name with a needle in my arm"
perhaps don't quite work, you would have to be very sound asleep indeed!

The lyrics on the website of the gentleman broadcaster himself say 'drunk asleep' but even so... (and the lyrics don't quite match up with the album version (which is also available to download free from the website.
There is actually another live version on Tom's website, where the year changes from 54 to 34. But (an alternative) 1934 or 2034? And the peace talks move from Dublin to Geneva.
Not as SFnal as 'Drive All Night' from the same album, though.

It's a kind of (partition) magic
Thanks for the responses, I have forwarded them!

Partition Magic and similar
Quick question... does anyone have any recentish experience with Partition Magic or similar? My cousin's partner wants to make her new PC duel boot. Going to XP SP3 & Ubuntu instead of just Ubuntu, as I understand it.

And whilst in random links mode...
... some of you may not have heard the self-referential boy-band-stylee song
Title of the song

Hell is other people's C++, cont.
This amused me. It is from the blog of Peter Seibel, author of Coders At Work (which more accurately could be titled 'People who write about software or writing software talk to someone who writes about software and he writes about it). I had a look at Bjarne Stroustrup's web-site to see if he had responded to Ken Thompson's account
"When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language. I never said it was a bad language. On and on and on." (quoted in the link above, quoted from the book).
Stroustrup's FAQ is fairly abrasive, and I am surprised he has yet to respond to this, but he hasn't updated it since the end of July.

Having said that, there is something of the Slashdot weenie in many of those comments about C++ in that article, however one of the comments is I think particularly telling..

"And I know a couple of people who are masters of C++ and I love to see how they do things because I think they don’t rely on it for the stuff that it’s not really that good at but totally use it as almost a metaprogramming language". Yes, well, hmm. I am trying to think of a good simile for this, something about someone talking about how they like to see chef X make creative use of his chainsaw without safety catch in the kitchen springs somhow to mind.

Grrrr
Semagic is playing up. Apologies to those who have seen a malformed post come and go twice. Grrrr.

BBC news story so big pinch of salt, obviously
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8339647.stm

"An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed. "

Dilemmas of LJ
Defriend the dead, which seems wrong somehow, or be reminded of their birthdays.

Question
Has anyone tried one of these things where you play it a chunk of music and it tells you what it is? Do they work?

There is a track I had years ago on a tape, alright decades, of some sort of soft jazz variety. Whilst we were at Marguta, probably the best vegetarian restaurant in the world, in Rome, they played this track, which I had forgotten about but was buried in my subconscious. Sadly when I asked it wasn't a CD, but was some sort of satellite radio service. I could probably find a tape with a crappy recording off the radio but on the whole I think it is only worth tracking down (it will be on a BASF C90 with a number written on it, in a box, somewhere, perhaps), if I can play it to the interwebs and have it tracked down.
I think I can rule out it being Spyro Gyra or Earl Klugh, who were the main exponents of such jazz who got mainstream(ish) radio play in the early 80s, though it is someone vaguely of that ilk.

So...
Back from holiday. I definitely recommend Budapest, which has a fine decaying in places fin de siècle splendour. The Metro line 1 which was the first underground line in continental Europe is particularly lovely.
This picture from Wikipedia doesn't really do it justice but is better than the ones I could find on Flikr. The hotel (Novatel) was an odd mix of art nouveau original features and Novatel blandness. Because quite a lot of London was built at the same time and, indeed, one could argue that Britain was at its peak at the same time, there is an odd mirror world feel to it. Though, of course, much less has happened to Budapest since due to their being essentially on the wrong side in both world wars and then not much building happening under the communist regime.

But I could have done without the car going 'bing' half way back from Gatwick and even more so I could have done without the power steering failing whilst turning right on a roundabout. Also, my phone has had what appears to be one of its failure modes (a message complaining it doesn't have a Sony Ericsson battery followed by it refusing to find any mobile networks). A Google for suitable keywords revealed that this seems to be a known problem and amid the voices crying into the wilderness was a suggestion that upgrading the firmware would fix it. This has gone surprisingly smoothly and seems to have done the trick. Hoorah. And it would have been a bit of a downer if this had happened whilst we were away, so better now than earlier. Bizarre though.

More Google Poetry (from Budapest)
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